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No-mess sand promises all the fun but with none of the cleanup

If you’ve ever cleaned up after an indoor sand spillage, you’re about to have your mind blown. A Swedish company has come up with a way to let you take sand out of the garden and into the house -- and with no need to fear for your carpets.

The space-age “Kinetic Sand” is still sand -- mostly. 98% sand, to be exact: the other 2% is a non-toxic polymer bonding agent that makes it sticky. Cleverly, though, the sand can only ever stick to itself -- so it stays together in a soft clump, and flows and shapes just like wet sand, but leaves surfaces completely dry and mess-free.

“If any clumps fall on the floor, even if they get trodden into the carpet, you can grab another piece of sand and just pick it right up with itself,” Shannon Gray, of manufacturer WabaFun, told us. “It really is the cleanest indoor sand out there.”

It’s even waterproof, which makes it the perfect medium for budding sandcastle artists. Now your moat can happily hold running water, with no danger of washing away your carefully sculpted towers and walls.

Don’t expect to be relaxing on a beach made of this stuff, though. At $14.95 for a 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) and $44.95 for a 5 kilogram box (about 11 pounds), it’d get pricey -- but even a couple of pounds of sand is enough for one child to play with, Gray said. Look for it showing up in stores in April.